New Workflow features in PowerShell 4.0

Support has been added for a new PipelineVariable common parameter in the context of iterative pipelines, such as those used by System Center Orchestrator; that is, pipelines that run commands simply left-to-right, as opposed to interspersed running by using streaming.

Parameter binding has been significantly enhanced to work outside of tab completion scenarios, such as with commands that do not exist in the current runspace.

Support for custom container activities has been added to Windows PowerShell Workflow. If an activity parameter is of the types Activity, Activity[]—or is a generic collection of activities—and the user has supplied a script block as an argument, then Windows PowerShell Workflow converts the script block to XAML, as with normal Windows PowerShell script-to-workflow compilation.

You can now throttle Foreach -Parallel activity statements by using the ThrottleLimit property.

The ErrorAction common parameter has a new valid value, Suspend, that is exclusively for workflows.

A workflow endpoint now automatically closes if there are no active sessions, no in-progress jobs, and no pending jobs. This feature conserves resources on the computer that is acting as the workflow server, when the automatic closure conditions have been met.